This volume was prepared by Inga Heiland while she was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in July 2016 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It comprises five chapters addressing one or more aspects of international trade and...

This paper explores the economic impacts of preferential trade agreements, conditional on their level of ambition. We cluster 278 agreements, encompassing 910 provisions over 18 policy areas and estimate the trade elasticity for the different clusters. We then use these elasticities in a series...

Geography, economic size, or common history, help predicting signed regional trade agreements (RTAs). However, not all signed RTAs are "natural" according to economic determinants. En-dogeneity and general equilibrium effects of RTAS are the two mechanisms addressed in this paper. We estimate...

Since July 2013, the EU and the United States have been negotiating a preferential trade agreement, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). We use a multicountry, multi-industry Ricardian trade model with national and international inputoutput linkages to quantify its...

Since July 2013, the EU and the US have been negotiating a preferential trade agreement (PTA), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). We use a multi-country, multi-industry Ricardian trade model with national and international input-output linkages to quantify its potential...

This paper provides practical techniques to policymakers for evaluating the potential economic effects of a Free Trade Agreement (FTA). To this end, the paper discusses how to apply three methods: (i) trade indicators, (ii) SMART (Software for Market Analysis and Restrictions on Trade) in WITS...

The issue of the impact of trade on specialisation structures and the effects of trade liberalisation on employment and labour markets has been intensively discussed in the recent literature on trade liberalisation and globalisation. In Europe this debate has gained new momentum in the...

This paper suggests a quantifiable multi-sector-multi-country economic model of goods and services production and consumption. It calibrates overall (variable and fixed) costs to market-specific sales by sector and decomposes these costs into observable and unobservable components. In an...

The US is likely to be at ‘the front of the queue’ for a new trade deal with the UK after Brexit. This would require the UK to escape the constraints of the EU’s Customs Union and also be free to diverge from EU regulations. But if these two conditions are not met, many would question...